Advertisement

11/07/2013

Refuting the Latest Smear of Me by Joshua Foust on Muhtorov Case

I'd much rather write about substance than have to keep defending myself from this creep, but I don't follow the "don't feed the trolls" advice -- and I think women bloggers on the Internet should fight back.

Joshua Foust has a story up on the paid-content site Beacon, The Most Bizarre Jihadist Trial You've Never Heard Of, where he is one of the selected authors for this new service, so not so many will see it. You have to pay $5/ month. If you do want to pay, then pay your $5 to some other author on the service (I paid Matthew Lee who is basically one of the very few critical reporters on the UN) -- that will enable you still to see any of the authors.

I've long covered the story of Jamshid Muhtorov, the Uzbek emigre who was arrested on charges of material support to terrorists. And I've long disputed Foust's characterization of the arrest in this case as unjust. I believe he was properly arrested on the evidence available.

And I predicted that Foust would change his story, now that he is trying to get a job again in intelligence or defense or Thinktankistan. And sure enough, he now concedes where he didn't before that this case is indeed about material assistance to a terrorist group -- before, he took a much more radical position and said Muhtorov was wrongfully arrested for "Interneting while Muslim" i.e. merely guilty of chat on the Internet with extremist groups, not of action, and that it was a "thought crime." He also discounted the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan as a real threat, although they have commited a range of terrorist attacks and have killed our soldiers in Afghanistan. He's now dropped his questioning of the IMU, but has kept his basic "progressive" position of denying there is a case here.

Anyone who has been following Registan.net knows EXACTLY the sleight of hand that went on here, and it is easily discoverable from reading all his back posts there.

In the past, Foust has accused me of putting Muhtorov in jail (!) and being a "liar and a fabulist" -- I refuted it here. This is so far out that I think it self-discredits, but too many people read and retweet Foust when they should know better, so let me point out the following refutations of his smear.

First, I should note that his entire article is lifted from my research. I'm the one that dug up the WikiLeaks cable and wrote about Muhtorov's past connections to various groups. The Registan bloggers had none of this, as you can easily see from their posts in the past on Registan.net. I was the one who put this all together. Foust steals liberally from this research and these links without any credit simply because he can.

Now, the paragraphs about me behind the pay wall:

Worse still, it seems the prosecution had relied on random blogposts to try to cast doubt on whether Mukhtarov was really a human rights activist. In describing Mukhtarov as too violent to release, it appears the prosecution tried to say he had faked his experience as a human rights worker in Uzbekistan:

A prosecutor also asserts that Muhtorov may have misrepresented himself a human-rights activist and that he may have received refugee status on fake grounds…

Holloway writes that some online articles say Muhtorov was an “opportunist who was dismissed from the Ezgulik Human Rights Society because he supported violent extremism.”

Another, Holloway wrote, “claims the defendant acted as an informant for Uzbek intelligence and received refugee status on fake grounds.”

Those articles come from Catherine Fitzpatrick, who is active in online circles and has a history of personally attacking those she disagrees with. She has spent, without exaggeration, years trying to personally defame a number of scholars, journalists, and activists who do not share her political beliefs, including this writer, and took to her blog to then try to defame Mukhtarov because people she disliked had expressed skepticism of his case (that full story is here).

That is who the prosecution relied on to try to deny Mukhtarov’s well-documented history with personally risky human rights activism in Uzbekistan. It was astonishing to long-term watchers of the country.

It is hard not to see Jamshid Mukhtarov as the victim of bad luck. Last May he held a brief hunger strike to protest his austere conditions. He also may have broken U.S. material support laws about banned terrorist groups.

Look, prosecutors do not jail people on the basis of random blog posts. Muhtorov was arrested and put in custody long before I ever blogged anything. There is not only FISA intelligence on this -- which is why it will become a national test -- but individual eye-witnesses from the Uzbek emigre population such as this one who also spoke to the emigre press that have given testimony about how Muhtorov became extremely religious and those around him grew concerned.

Foust published a picture of Foust without credit that has been repeatedly published by uznews.net and other emigre outlets; he notes his beard but could have also noted his forehead bruises from prostrations in prayer, which is what emigres have noted.

Foust does not read Russian. I do. My blog post about Muhtorov isn't my opinion, but my translations of a series of other people's articles about him. That has always been something Foust has chosen to ignore. In translating excerpts of these sources, I've been careful to show how they are biased --- the Kyrgyz refugee official who says Muhtorov may have been cooperating with the police as an informant and thought he was an opportunist; the Uzbek emigre who is known for his frequent attacks on others who thought he was cooperating with the Uzbek secret police; and the human rights group that he left after they confronted him over financial issues-- a fact Foust ignores each time he tells this story as it doesn't fit the narrative. There's also the claims from the emigre who says that Muhtorov was involved in disputes with the authorities of his family's vodka distribution business (this was before he became religious) and his sister's jailing, and that was his basis for a vendetta against the government, not participation in the human rights movement.

The prosecutor's particular statement isn't based on me merely spouting, it's based on reading a blog about translations of other sources who declared Muhtorov to be an opportunist, i.e. using the human rights movement to emigrate. Foust fails to note that he wasn't involved in the Andijan events and wasn't even there during the massacre.

Indeed there is concern that he received refugee status on false grounds, but he had a convoluted history that began with anger of his sister's arrest in a murder case and culminated in his flight to Kyrgyzstan on a secret policeman's tip to get out of town (?!) and ultimately his entry to the US at a time when the US was allowing in Uzbek refugees. He does indeed face a well-founded fear of perscution and likely torture if returned (unless in fact he was a police agent all along, and even that may not help), so he shouldn't be returned to Uzbekistan. But he was properly arrested and his detention extended, and certainly not on some blog's say-so.

Foust then proceeds to claim falsely that I have a "history of personally attacking those she disagrees with." Then he links to those few online stalkers who have endlessly attacked me and who I debunk in my tongue-in-cheek "Advice to Google Witch-hunters" at the top of this blog. That includes Benjamin Duranske, a coder-turned-lawyer with radical ideas (like brain-uploading to the Internet, support of the Caliphate, and support of business in China against dissidents -- to mention only some of the issues I confronted him about). He's someone who deserved a good pushback and I'm proud of doing so. In fact, I should have realized sooner that people like this weren't just in and around the coders of Second Life, but in general becoming a whole threat to the society at large.

As for the notion that I have "spent, without exaggeration, years trying to personally defame a number of scholars, journalists, and activists who do not share her political beliefs, including this writer," what he means is just...him and his two friends at Registan, Nathan Hamm and Sarah Kendzior. (All three of them once held academic or think-tank or consulting positions; all three of them are now free-lance journalists so I can't help thinking I'm far from the only person with a problem with them -- there are scores of academics, journalists, and nonprofit activists critical of all of them, but only quietly because they fear controversy or being smeared.)

It all began when I questioned Foust's repeated minimization of human rights problems and tacit support of the regimes of places like Uzbekistan when he launched an outrageous series of attacks on human rights leaders over their criticism of Gulnara Karimova. Astoundingly, Foust savagely attacked anyone who exposed her antics, claiming they were lying at worst or at best, ineffective. Everyone in the human rights movement from Human Rights Watch to Committee to Protect Journalists knows this, but they don't speak out at the advice of lawyers and bosses. They all know exactly what Foust is about and how he has twisted and turned on his positions.

I pointed out that his minimization of the massacre in Kazakhstan as a mere labour dispute that would be smoothed over was no different than the establishment views he ridiculed of another scholar; when he saw that someone dared to say this on his blog, he went wild, and sent his troops after me. I refuted each point at length here after I was banned. These "scholars" (Kendzior has since left academia to work for Al Jazeera) then harassed and bullied me, claiming that I "lied" about the mistreatment of political prisones in Uzbekistan for which I had ample testimony from relatives and lawyers. (A good summary of all of this is here).

A notorious series of take-downs of Foust by the scurrilous Mark Ames were actually prompted by the same incident -- Foust's down-playing of the massacre in Kazakhstan. I don't carry any water for Ames, who is a kind of neo-Bolshevik and admirer of Edward Limonov, head of the National Bolshevik Party of Russia -- it's too bad that my more considered rebuttal of Foust's outrageous apologia for the regimes of Central Asia gets far less notice than Ames' flamboyant mining of Foust's sad past as a victim of bullying turned bully himself.

While I don't call him names, in all his rants about me, Foust has called me a "liar," a "lunatic," a "fabulist" etc. and dredged up stalkers from the online community of Second Life who harassed me years ago to make his case. He has to link to a Google cache in the case of Benjamin Duranske, because Duranske, who now works at Paypal after a series of other jobs didn't work out, removed his hate page against me when he took a job at a law firm some years ago because he realized that sort of page does more harm to his reputation and his firm than me.

It's worth watching this debate in the original -- lots of people are happy I took on Robert Wright. In sum, he hated it when I raised the issue of the ethics involved (even if legality is not at issue) in taking files from a source like Manning and not caring about the ramifications of the anarchist assault he is making on a liberal government.

A frustrating thing with this story is that key people I've interviewed won't talk and won't be cited even off the record. But I know that eventually the story will be established. If there were not sufficient grounds to sentence Muhtorov and he released, then justice will prevail -- I don't need Muhtorov to remain in jail to stand by my views that he was properly arrested and our government's intelligence agencies should continue doing their job to watch out for terrorists. It may be that sufficient pressure will be put on the prosecutors, and sufficient evidence brought forward that Muhtorov will be released. So be it -- that doesn't change a thing about the essential issue here: the difference between human rights work and opportunism; the difference between human rights work and abetting terrorism.

Muhtorov chose to leave Uzbekistan while others chose to stay and keep fighting for human rights. He wasn't jailed as so many were because he didn't really engage in activism. He was able to create a story for himself and get out and get to the US -- and he's not the first nor the last to do so.

US law takes seriously the issue of material support to terrorism. It's not trivial. A mere $300 in support is enough to get arrested. A translation of a web page for Al Qaeda earns a jail sentence as we know. I support these lawful actions by the US government and do not see them as a chill on speech - there is plenty of untrammeled pro-jihad speech everywhere, just look at Youtube. We have only to think of the Tsarnaev brothers and those who lost their limbs inthe Boston bombing to understand that intelligence-gathering for the purpose of trying to prevent terrorism is necessary in a democratic society.

Comments

Refuting the Latest Smear of Me by Joshua Foust on Muhtorov Case

I'd much rather write about substance than have to keep defending myself from this creep, but I don't follow the "don't feed the trolls" advice -- and I think women bloggers on the Internet should fight back.

Joshua Foust has a story up on the paid-content site Beacon, The Most Bizarre Jihadist Trial You've Never Heard Of, where he is one of the selected authors for this new service, so not so many will see it. You have to pay $5/ month. If you do want to pay, then pay your $5 to some other author on the service (I paid Matthew Lee who is basically one of the very few critical reporters on the UN) -- that will enable you still to see any of the authors.

I've long covered the story of Jamshid Muhtorov, the Uzbek emigre who was arrested on charges of material support to terrorists. And I've long disputed Foust's characterization of the arrest in this case as unjust. I believe he was properly arrested on the evidence available.

And I predicted that Foust would change his story, now that he is trying to get a job again in intelligence or defense or Thinktankistan. And sure enough, he now concedes where he didn't before that this case is indeed about material assistance to a terrorist group -- before, he took a much more radical position and said Muhtorov was wrongfully arrested for "Interneting while Muslim" i.e. merely guilty of chat on the Internet with extremist groups, not of action, and that it was a "thought crime." He also discounted the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan as a real threat, although they have commited a range of terrorist attacks and have killed our soldiers in Afghanistan. He's now dropped his questioning of the IMU, but has kept his basic "progressive" position of denying there is a case here.

Anyone who has been following Registan.net knows EXACTLY the sleight of hand that went on here, and it is easily discoverable from reading all his back posts there.

In the past, Foust has accused me of putting Muhtorov in jail (!) and being a "liar and a fabulist" -- I refuted it here. This is so far out that I think it self-discredits, but too many people read and retweet Foust when they should know better, so let me point out the following refutations of his smear.

First, I should note that his entire article is lifted from my research. I'm the one that dug up the WikiLeaks cable and wrote about Muhtorov's past connections to various groups. The Registan bloggers had none of this, as you can easily see from their posts in the past on Registan.net. I was the one who put this all together. Foust steals liberally from this research and these links without any credit simply because he can.

Now, the paragraphs about me behind the pay wall:

Worse still, it seems the prosecution had relied on random blogposts to try to cast doubt on whether Mukhtarov was really a human rights activist. In describing Mukhtarov as too violent to release, it appears the prosecution tried to say he had faked his experience as a human rights worker in Uzbekistan:

A prosecutor also asserts that Muhtorov may have misrepresented himself a human-rights activist and that he may have received refugee status on fake grounds…

Holloway writes that some online articles say Muhtorov was an “opportunist who was dismissed from the Ezgulik Human Rights Society because he supported violent extremism.”

Another, Holloway wrote, “claims the defendant acted as an informant for Uzbek intelligence and received refugee status on fake grounds.”

Those articles come from Catherine Fitzpatrick, who is active in online circles and has a history of personally attacking those she disagrees with. She has spent, without exaggeration, years trying to personally defame a number of scholars, journalists, and activists who do not share her political beliefs, including this writer, and took to her blog to then try to defame Mukhtarov because people she disliked had expressed skepticism of his case (that full story is here).

That is who the prosecution relied on to try to deny Mukhtarov’s well-documented history with personally risky human rights activism in Uzbekistan. It was astonishing to long-term watchers of the country.

It is hard not to see Jamshid Mukhtarov as the victim of bad luck. Last May he held a brief hunger strike to protest his austere conditions. He also may have broken U.S. material support laws about banned terrorist groups.

Look, prosecutors do not jail people on the basis of random blog posts. Muhtorov was arrested and put in custody long before I ever blogged anything. There is not only FISA intelligence on this -- which is why it will become a national test -- but individual eye-witnesses from the Uzbek emigre population such as this one who also spoke to the emigre press that have given testimony about how Muhtorov became extremely religious and those around him grew concerned.

Foust published a picture of Foust without credit that has been repeatedly published by uznews.net and other emigre outlets; he notes his beard but could have also noted his forehead bruises from prostrations in prayer, which is what emigres have noted.

Foust does not read Russian. I do. My blog post about Muhtorov isn't my opinion, but my translations of a series of other people's articles about him. That has always been something Foust has chosen to ignore. In translating excerpts of these sources, I've been careful to show how they are biased --- the Kyrgyz refugee official who says Muhtorov may have been cooperating with the police as an informant and thought he was an opportunist; the Uzbek emigre who is known for his frequent attacks on others who thought he was cooperating with the Uzbek secret police; and the human rights group that he left after they confronted him over financial issues-- a fact Foust ignores each time he tells this story as it doesn't fit the narrative. There's also the claims from the emigre who says that Muhtorov was involved in disputes with the authorities of his family's vodka distribution business (this was before he became religious) and his sister's jailing, and that was his basis for a vendetta against the government, not participation in the human rights movement.

The prosecutor's particular statement isn't based on me merely spouting, it's based on reading a blog about translations of other sources who declared Muhtorov to be an opportunist, i.e. using the human rights movement to emigrate. Foust fails to note that he wasn't involved in the Andijan events and wasn't even there during the massacre.

Indeed there is concern that he received refugee status on false grounds, but he had a convoluted history that began with anger of his sister's arrest in a murder case and culminated in his flight to Kyrgyzstan on a secret policeman's tip to get out of town (?!) and ultimately his entry to the US at a time when the US was allowing in Uzbek refugees. He does indeed face a well-founded fear of perscution and likely torture if returned (unless in fact he was a police agent all along, and even that may not help), so he shouldn't be returned to Uzbekistan. But he was properly arrested and his detention extended, and certainly not on some blog's say-so.

Foust then proceeds to claim falsely that I have a "history of personally attacking those she disagrees with." Then he links to those few online stalkers who have endlessly attacked me and who I debunk in my tongue-in-cheek "Advice to Google Witch-hunters" at the top of this blog. That includes Benjamin Duranske, a coder-turned-lawyer with radical ideas (like brain-uploading to the Internet, support of the Caliphate, and support of business in China against dissidents -- to mention only some of the issues I confronted him about). He's someone who deserved a good pushback and I'm proud of doing so. In fact, I should have realized sooner that people like this weren't just in and around the coders of Second Life, but in general becoming a whole threat to the society at large.

As for the notion that I have "spent, without exaggeration, years trying to personally defame a number of scholars, journalists, and activists who do not share her political beliefs, including this writer," what he means is just...him and his two friends at Registan, Nathan Hamm and Sarah Kendzior. (All three of them once held academic or think-tank or consulting positions; all three of them are now free-lance journalists so I can't help thinking I'm far from the only person with a problem with them -- there are scores of academics, journalists, and nonprofit activists critical of all of them, but only quietly because they fear controversy or being smeared.)

It all began when I questioned Foust's repeated minimization of human rights problems and tacit support of the regimes of places like Uzbekistan when he launched an outrageous series of attacks on human rights leaders over their criticism of Gulnara Karimova. Astoundingly, Foust savagely attacked anyone who exposed her antics, claiming they were lying at worst or at best, ineffective. Everyone in the human rights movement from Human Rights Watch to Committee to Protect Journalists knows this, but they don't speak out at the advice of lawyers and bosses. They all know exactly what Foust is about and how he has twisted and turned on his positions.

I pointed out that his minimization of the massacre in Kazakhstan as a mere labour dispute that would be smoothed over was no different than the establishment views he ridiculed of another scholar; when he saw that someone dared to say this on his blog, he went wild, and sent his troops after me. I refuted each point at length here after I was banned. These "scholars" (Kendzior has since left academia to work for Al Jazeera) then harassed and bullied me, claiming that I "lied" about the mistreatment of political prisones in Uzbekistan for which I had ample testimony from relatives and lawyers. (A good summary of all of this is here).

A notorious series of take-downs of Foust by the scurrilous Mark Ames were actually prompted by the same incident -- Foust's down-playing of the massacre in Kazakhstan. I don't carry any water for Ames, who is a kind of neo-Bolshevik and admirer of Edward Limonov, head of the National Bolshevik Party of Russia -- it's too bad that my more considered rebuttal of Foust's outrageous apologia for the regimes of Central Asia gets far less notice than Ames' flamboyant mining of Foust's sad past as a victim of bullying turned bully himself.

While I don't call him names, in all his rants about me, Foust has called me a "liar," a "lunatic," a "fabulist" etc. and dredged up stalkers from the online community of Second Life who harassed me years ago to make his case. He has to link to a Google cache in the case of Benjamin Duranske, because Duranske, who now works at Paypal after a series of other jobs didn't work out, removed his hate page against me when he took a job at a law firm some years ago because he realized that sort of page does more harm to his reputation and his firm than me.

It's worth watching this debate in the original -- lots of people are happy I took on Robert Wright. In sum, he hated it when I raised the issue of the ethics involved (even if legality is not at issue) in taking files from a source like Manning and not caring about the ramifications of the anarchist assault he is making on a liberal government.

A frustrating thing with this story is that key people I've interviewed won't talk and won't be cited even off the record. But I know that eventually the story will be established. If there were not sufficient grounds to sentence Muhtorov and he released, then justice will prevail -- I don't need Muhtorov to remain in jail to stand by my views that he was properly arrested and our government's intelligence agencies should continue doing their job to watch out for terrorists. It may be that sufficient pressure will be put on the prosecutors, and sufficient evidence brought forward that Muhtorov will be released. So be it -- that doesn't change a thing about the essential issue here: the difference between human rights work and opportunism; the difference between human rights work and abetting terrorism.

Muhtorov chose to leave Uzbekistan while others chose to stay and keep fighting for human rights. He wasn't jailed as so many were because he didn't really engage in activism. He was able to create a story for himself and get out and get to the US -- and he's not the first nor the last to do so.

US law takes seriously the issue of material support to terrorism. It's not trivial. A mere $300 in support is enough to get arrested. A translation of a web page for Al Qaeda earns a jail sentence as we know. I support these lawful actions by the US government and do not see them as a chill on speech - there is plenty of untrammeled pro-jihad speech everywhere, just look at Youtube. We have only to think of the Tsarnaev brothers and those who lost their limbs inthe Boston bombing to understand that intelligence-gathering for the purpose of trying to prevent terrorism is necessary in a democratic society.